Email has become a prolific means of sending information between people. One effective use of email is to send an internet location, or a uniform resource locator (URL), to someone so that she can visit a web page that another user finds interesting. When the user who reads this email clicks the URL, or types it into the browser, the browser automatically downloads the page at the URL. In one example, a user searches on a web site for a hard-to-find item, and the URL for the web page with the item is long due to the process used to find the item or the tree structure of the server that hosts the web page. When the user sends the URL to another user in an email communication, the URL may be very long necessitating it to be split between multiple lines. This causes problems when, in one example, two users have incompatible email programs. Often the receiving email program will not be able to read a URL that has been split by another email program.
One solution to this problem is presented by “tinyurl” at www.tinyurl.com (with a comma inserted instead of a period before “com” to prevent execution at the USPTO website, and likewise hereinafter). At www.tinyurl.com, a user can enter a URL and it generates an alias URL. However, it can be used to make a URL anonymous. For example, an unscrupulous user can send a URL for a web site with potentially objectionable content and shorten the URL down to tinyurl.com/hflk. The recipient of the tinyURL doesn't know what web site she is visiting when she clicks on the tinyURL. It could even be a web site that introduces a virus to the computer. There is no means to tell what web site the tinyURL is actually downloading. Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.